February 24, 2016

Many profess to be determinists, but in practice they disregard it. p.xvii

"to proclaim that science is the search for causes ... is not to say that all events have them" p.xxiii

"...neutrality is also a moral attitude..." p.xxx

"...Hobbes, not Locke, turned out to be right: man sought neither happiness or liberty nor justice, but, above and before all,security." p.19

"Growing numbers of human beings are prepared to purchase this sense of security even at the cost of allowing vast tracts of life to be controlled by persons who, whether consciously or not, act systematically to narrow the horizon of human activity to manageable proportions, to train human beings into more easily combinable parts -- interchangeable, almost prefabricated -- of a total pattern." p.30, emphasis mine, this is exactly what I see when I observe college students at the local universities.

"For in the past there were conflicts of ideas; whereas what characterizes our time is less the struggle of one set of ideas against another than the mounting wave of hostility to all ideas as such. ...ideas are considered the source of too much disquiet..." p.32 Again, this is the attitude that prevails in all of our institutions.

"Has not every authoritarian institution, every irrationalist movement, been engaged upon something of this kind -- the artificial stilling of doubts, the attempt either to discredit uncomfortable questions or to educate men not to ask them? Was this not the practice of the great organized churches, indeed of every institution from the nation state to small sectarian establishments? Was this not the attitude of the enemies of reason from the earliest mystery cults to the romanticism, anarchistic nihilism, surrealism, neo-Oriental cults of the last century and a half? Why should our age be specially accused of addiction to the particular tendency which formed a central theme of social doctrines which go back to Plato, or the sect of the medieval Assassins, or much Eastern thought and mysticism?" [p.35-36]

"Where there is no choice there is no anxiety; and a happy release from responsibility. Some human beings have always preferred the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one's proper place in the cosmos, to the painful conflicts and complexities of the disordered freedom of the world beyond the walls." [p.111-122]

I'll stop here as this book should be read in its entirety and all excerpts should be taken in context... Please note that there is a later edition with an additional essay...

November 03, 2015

There is a quite remarkable amount of misunderstanding about liberty in social life. Many people seem to believe that if society -- most obviously in the form of the policeman -- is not actually flagging their car down in the street, tugging them along to the police station by means of handcuffs, refusing them permission to build their new bungalow on the site they desire, or carrying out one of the many other official activities which obviously and immediately impinge on their freedom, then they are free individuals.

This approach, this philosophy of liberty, is quite out of step with the facts. We are all restricted, hemmed in on every side by a mass of regulations, both official and unofficial, which when added up drastically reduce our freedom of behaviour -- even our thought -- and it is surely obvious that life in huge, highly complex societies requires an enormous amount of co-ordination of human activity simply in order to make the myriad pieces of jigsaw fit in and the whole society work.

In addition to the constraints on individual liberty brought about by legal and other compulsion and essential co-operative activities, there are many others, more or less binding through public opinion and improper use of positions of authority, which reduce it still further. The result is that in a modern society surprising little liberty is left.

Of course there are some individualists, people who think for themselves, do what they want to do or believe is right, regardless of social pressures and the norms of their society, but the fact is that most of them meet a lot of opposition. Most of us, far from welcoming such independence and originality, will actually try to damp it down, cut it out if possible. [p.68-69]

The first step on the road to true individual liberty is knowledge, including a large component of self-knowledge. [p.94]

To take one small practical example. Some people want the microfreedom to blare out pop music from portable radios in public places whilst others want the microfreedom not to have to suffer unnecessary noise. These freedoms are obviously incompatible, a decision must be made between them and one group forced to give up a valued microfreedom. [p.97]

Progress be damned. All this will do will be to allow the lower classes to move around unnecessarily. Duke of Wellington (on seeing his first railway train) [epigraph on p.157]

The German philosopher Schopenhauer is said to have likened human beings to hedgehogs. We are drawn together warmth, physical and spiritual, but if we get too close we begin to feel the spines as well as the comfort and are driven away again. My guess would be that even if our needs in this respect were constant, which I doubt, most of us would fail to achieve a consistent optimization of the space relationship with our fellows so that we would be driven to oscillate....This would require the availability of 'withdrawal-space' and have implications for the optimization of population. This philosophy of space is reflected in Sartre's play In Camera, in which the character Garcin observes:

Remember all we were told about the torture chambers, the fire and brimstone....There's no need....Hell is other people. [p.164]

With our massive pollution of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide we may, through the 'greenhouse effect', raise the temperature of the Earth, melt the glaciers and again raise the sea level by 70 feet -- thereby drowning many of the world's major cities and much of its land. On the other hand our parallel pollution of the atmosphere with dust and dirt tends to lower the Earth's temperature, by scattering the sun's energy back into space, and this could start another ice age. [p.209, note that this book was published in 1971]

On acquiring the new status of car owner, we immediately lose many microfreedoms we possess as pedestrians alone. Our use of road space is immediately constrained -- when at the wheel we are not allowed to wander about at will as we are when on foot. We have to pay a tax to use the vehicle on a public road and for insurance against third-party risks. We must qualify and pay for a driving licence and many other items -- we have lost our microfreedoms to do without all of these things. People regard most of these as reasonable, up to a point; the vital question, however, is up to what point? [p.217]

It surprising how infrequently this point is brought up.

[Quoting Harold Cox from his The Problem of Population (1922)]

...If the command [to replenish the earth] is a universal junction, as the persons who quote it invariably imply, its application extends to all men and women. Yet, in defiance of this command, the Roman Catholic Church has established a celibate priesthood for men and nunneries for celibate women...who it regards...as being peculiarly holy persons, although the vows they take involve direct disobedience to the divine command to be fruitful and multiply.... [p.297]

If what we want to do is to optimize human joy and fulfilment -- one might say joy through fulfilment -- one of the means to this noble end would surely be the optimization of liberty. We need to create a system in which every individual is free to pursue as far as possible, without harming others, the things that he regards as desirable, which give him satisfaction in the light of his own unique genetic inheritance, social conditioning, and self-development up to that point. We need to create a system in which all get what they need and give to society what they are able to give. [p.305]

A genuine desire to maximize individual liberty requires open-mindedness, a long view, and a realistic analysis of the human condition so that we do not grant to ourselves freedoms in the short run which will destroy more or greater freedoms in the long run. In particular we have to weigh the ultimate cost in liberty of allowing to continue indefinitely the present freedom to breed ad lib.... [p.318]